They had me at scorpions…

My goodness, Gentle Reader.  These many days since the last post have been filled with frivolity.  Not.

Whether it’s been the intense heat, the smoke from all the fires, the fact that all the kids are out of school and busy surfing the web, or sunspots, the fact is we’ve for the most part had no internet.  For a brief moment there was suspicion of a fried modem, but in the end it appears to be the usual thing.  HughesNet, which is the only game in this one horse town, does not try harder. So I had to keep all the words to myself, more or less.  Which perhaps was not all bad, being a culling and decision making sort of thing, keeping words to oneself.  But more on that later.

The other really fun thing that happened was the Annual Running of the Ants.  As dawn blasted across the sky here a few days ago, 5 or 6ish in the a.m., we once again found ourselves blinking in bed, covered in large, stinky and biting ants.  Vacuuming, shoveling, hosing, trips to town to return with, alas, not bait stations (my brain evidently leaked out my nostrils on the way to town and I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at) but a ridiculous syringe thingy full of goop (of which naturally some found its way into my mouth), more bait stations…..oh, it was just as much fun as ever.  Maybe more.  So when we bethought ourselves of the electronic pest repeller a friend had used against HER ants, we waited feverishly until the internet gave us a 15 minute shot, and found the Pest Repeller Ultimate.  Makes sounds they don’t like and ALSO, here’s the big thing, repels scorpions.  Eureka! we cried, we’re ordering this baby this instant.  Now of course our only problem is where to plug it in but so far…..SO FAR……

Yes.  So far?  So good.  The spiders are bailing, it seems, and we’ve seen no interior ants OR scorpions (WOOOOHOOOOOOO)  Except that the Partner had to kill another rattler last night.   But what the heck.   Then there was the excitement provided by PG&E.  They had scheduled a day long power outage for this week.  You gotta hand it to them, PLANNING to turn off people’s power at the hottest part of the year.  I mean, really.  Also in view of the fact that a large percentage of people here are on wells which means when the electricity is off there’s no water, spectacular timing when it’s 108 degrees in the shade.  We shlepped into a rental place and got a generator to use for that day.  Filled buckets and garbage cans with water.  Then, in a shocking moment of rationality it all got called off in the instant morning.  So, OK, Return generator, blahblahblah.  But at the end of the day, the power went off anyway and we learned even more about the precarious nature of the power grid right here, including the fact that OUR part of it is installed upside down.   Among other things.

Aside from all that…..I’ve been mulling over what exactly wishful thinking might be- I mean, is abiding in faith that things, since they are what they are, will be as they should no matter how it looks in the moment…is THAT wishful thinking?   I think not, really, especially if a person finds themselves confronting something huge (like serious illness or the global “economy”)- it is a way to maintain focus on what needs to be done, and stay in the present instead of inhabiting either a boogeyman-filled future or a regrettable (or nostalgic, for that matter)  past.  It continues to boil down to that Emersonian distinction between AUTHORITY and SPIRIT.  The shift from an externally dictated life to an inner directed one is not, maybe, something everyone wants to do.  Taking that inner direction means to some extent that you abandon acting out of your ego, your personal desires and whatnots, and take a longer and larger view for instruction.  It means on some level your actions are about everyone and not just you.  Gandhi’s admonition to assess one’s actions by whether or not they will be of help to the poorest of the poor….can seem overwhelming.  What can one person do, after all?  But the truth is that one person CAN do something helpful.  Keeping your little piece of the Whole Catastrophe moving in the right (minded) direction really does help others.  There’s a difference between things moving in the right direction all together, more or less, and everyone being in a lock step handed down in the interests of control.  Rivers flow, clouds move, things go on and the huge interconnection can be missed.  That interconnection, though, provides wisdom to the observant- the patterns and flows of things can be seen over time and then the story is more like an astonishing piece of music, in which each thing has a solo along with being an important part of the band.  This leads to the OTHER thing I’ve been mulling over (while vacuuming and weeding and all the rest of it) which is the difference between “spiritual” and “intuitive” healers.  This, to me, is perhaps the way the healing path gets divided overall, no matter what modality the healing is being performed in.  It’s a question of already having a story and fitting the individual into it, versus spending the time to observe, to learn the individual’s story as a whole and seeing how that fits into the overall pattern.   Both ways have things to offer.  I continue to think, though, that one thing going on now, in these times, is a return to the awareness that one size does not fit all.  Each thing, each situation, has to be looked at as a unique constellation, from which threads of continuity may be pulled and harmony can be rewoven.  Tall order, perhaps.

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